Strength & Conditioning - The Connection Between Brainspotting & Mental Performance For Olympic Weighting Athletes
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About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Introduction: Brainspotting, Olympic Weightlifting Athletes & Performance
People who are new to Olympic weightlifting may be surprised to hear this, but this sport is more of a psychological feat than it is a physical one. I can say this as both a former athlete in the sport and as a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist with over 20 years of coaching experience. Interestingly, through my conversations with strength coaches I often find that they either misunderstand or underestimate the importance of mental performance in the sport.
For this issue of the Training Report I wanted to take the time to review the psychological implications involved with Olympic weightlifting performances for athletes. First, I want to discuss common psychological obstacles that Olympic weightlifters face during competition. Next, I want to review the neuroscience behind these obstacles. Finally, I want to review a new cutting-edge tactic that sport psychologists are using with great success in other sports that can also help weightlifters. Let’s begin by reviewing common mental obstacles in the sport.
Part I. Mental & Physical Challenges Of Olympic Weightlifters
In order to successfully execute the lifts in Olympic weightlifting, athletes need to have complete mind-body synchronization. If even one aspect of an athlete’s mind or body is not perfectly functioning, it will be nearly impossible to accomplish new personal records in the sport. For instance, when trying to snatch an athlete has a margin of error of between 1-2 inches, which means that when the athlete is in the ‘catch’ phase of the lift, the barbell can only go either 1-2 inches behind or in front of the lifter’s center of gravity.
Because this is such a small window for success, this means that the potential for many things to go wrong dramatically increases. Some additional obstacles that become magnified because of this include nagging injuries that can cause distractions, the mental pressure of performing in front of large crowds, missing initial weightlifting attempts which also increases pressure, being at risk for dealing with overtraining syndrome, or dealing with psychological trauma. So how can neuropsychology help strength coaches better understand the these issues?
Part II. How Sport Psychologists Use Neuroscience To Understand The Mental Game Of Olympic-Style Weightlifting
The first place where we need to start in our understanding between the interplay of neuroscience and Olympic weightlifting, is that this sport is no different than any other sport in terms of its’ psychological obstacles. At the end of the day all sports are stress tests, and stress tests are designed to expose unresolved mental and physical issues. Furthermore, these stress tests require full body focus and full psychological focus. Any unresolved issues will prevent this focus from happening through the form of an emotional dysregulation behavior. I have written about this in previous Training Reports, but essentially the experiences of physical and mental performance pressure can cause psychological trauma. So what exactly is occurring in the brain during this process?
When a stress event occurs, sensory information about the environment such as sight, smell, sound, and touch converge in an area of the brain called the thalamus. The information is processed in the thalamus and then passed on to the amygdala where the emotional significance of the event is determined. The excessive stress that occurs during a trauma event triggers the amygdala to send a lightening speed message down to the hypothalamus and the brain stem, recruiting the stress hormone system and autonomic nervous system to orchestrate a whole body response (e.g. fight, flight, freeze, etc.). This overrides our prefrontal cortex rendering it unable to filter out unimportant information, all of which create performance blocks. So what can coaches and athletes do to prevent this from becoming a bigger problem than necessary?
Part III. How Brainspotting Helps Olympic Weightlifting Athletes Overcome The Yips & Achieve Flow States
There is a new psychotherapy intervention that is gaining traction within the field of sport psychology and human performance called Brainspotting. Sport psychologists have been turning more and more to this intervention because of how perfectly it is designed to specifically help athlete populations. Brainspotting is a brain-based psychotherapy technique that utilizes the client’s field of vision to identify unresolved psychological issues. Some of these unresolved issues can include sport-related trauma such as injuries or trauma from outside sport (e.g. car acidents).
In Brainspotting we say ‘where you look affects how you feel’ and through this process clients have the ability to access the parts of their brain that traditional psychotherapy approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy are unable to do. This results in clients being able to directly address the true ‘underlying’ issue (which we refer to as a Brain Spot) that has created conflict, allowing individuals to move from needing to constantly cope to not needing to cope at all. If you are interested in learning more, use the link here to get more information!
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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